New Service Launched to Help Customers Offset Shipping

A new service allows customers to calculate and offset the carbon impact of shipping individual packages.

ShipGreen uses a mathematical model to calculate the emissions of individual product shipment using the weight of each item, distance and means of travel, such as road, rail or air.

Similar services, the company claims, rely on flat rates or averages of all shipped products to calculate emissions figures and offset amount.

The service is geared toward online retailers, which can put a ShipGreen link on their websites that calculate of offset shipping. The ShipGreen service is free of charge for retailers.

During checkout, customers can choose an offset type, such as a wind, solar or forestry project. The company focuses on projects that are independently verified by third parties.

Projects include a hydropower plant in Indonesia, wind projects in Madagascar and New Zealand, a biomass facility in India, and a reforestation project in China.

ShipGreen co-founders Jason Sperling and Tim Buchanan also helped create the Prairie Tree Project in eastern Colorado, an afforestation venture that allows consumers personal offsets. The project also helps business audit their carbon footprints.

Arpad Horwath and Cristiano Facanha from the University of California, Berkeley, partnered with ShipGreen to create the emissions calculation model.

from: Climatebiz.com

BeGreen: Carbon calculator

We all contribute to global warming when we do things like heat and cool our homes, drive our cars, and fly on airplanes. The good news? BeGreen empowers you to take an active role in neutralizing your carbon emissions and reducing your impact on global warming. Simply follow our tips to begin decreasing the energy you use each day, and offset the rest of your carbon-emitting energy use through our easy-to-use carbon calculator and BeGreen Carbon Offsets. Once you do, tell the planet (or at least a few friends). Together we can make a world of difference, but we need your help. So go ahead and be green, now.

Go to Carbon Calculator: http://www.begreennow.com/calculator

Links: Carbon Footprint Calculators, Other Calculators & Carbon Offsets

Environmental Defense PaperCalculator - Calculate the environmental impact of the paper products you use.

The Carbon Diet - Track your carbon footprint every day and compare your footprint with those of your friends.

NativeEnergy - Carbon offsets and a travel carbon calculator.

The Nature Conservancy Carbon Calculator - Another carbon footprint calculator.

BeGreen - A carbon calculator and information resource that also offers carbon offsets.

zerofootprint - Helping individuals, organizations, and cities reduce their environmental impact (their goal is to get 1,000,000 people pledging to reduce their environmental footprint by 10% in one year).

Yahoo! Green Carbon Footprint Calculator - Another carbon footprint calculator.

Ecological Footprint Quiz - Find out how much “nature” your lifestyle requires.

terrapass - A carbon offset company that has an emissions calculator.

50 Ways to Green Your Business - Part IV

31 One initial problem with Staples' new emphasis on recycled paper: less durable products. The solution? Reinvent paper. The company's hanging file folders now include 50% regenerated cotton (aka "denim"), and its "carbon neutral" notebook paper is 90% bagasse, a sugarcane by-product the company buys from Argentine farmers who would otherwise burn the spent cane, polluting their own communities.

32 Talk about turning garbage into a useful resource: The University of New Hampshire signed a deal this year with Waste Management Inc. to get 80% to 85% of the power and heat for its 14,000-student campus, using methane piped in from a nearby landfill. UNH must build a 12.7-mile pipeline to carry the gas, but the $45 million project is expected to save enough to pay for itself in 10 years.

33 Take the foodie trend of consuming only locally grown products and apply it to sportswear: That's what Nike (NYSE:NKE) has done with its Considered line. The company has committed to sourcing as much of the products' raw materials as possible--recycled polyester and rubber, organic cotton, hemp--from within 200 miles of the factory, cutting the environmental and financial costs of transportation. Of course, the finished goods still have a long trip to market; the Considered line is made in China and Thailand.

34 If flying is the new smoking, fractional jet companies are the eco-equivalent of Philip Morris. But this fall, Warren Buffett's NetJets begins hitting its clients with a healthy dose of guilt serum: $5,000 extra a year, to pay for carbon offsets.

35 Surfers are generally pro-environment; their petrochemical-based gear is not. Patagonia is looking to change that. Its latest wet suit is made of Japanese neoprene, unbleached New Zealand merino wool, and PVC-free kneepads; and it uses 80% less petroleum than its competitors. Better yet (for surfers), at 3 millimeters thick, it produces the same warmth typically associated with 5 millimeters.

36 Emissions aren't the only enviro-scourge of the air-travel industry. U.S. airlines throw away enough aluminum cans every year to build 58 new 747s. At the urging of its own flight attendants, Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL) launched an on-board recycling program this past summer in a few of its hubs. In the first three months, flight attendants, who sorted cans, newspapers, and plastic, collected 60 tons of recyclables. The program will expand to all domestic flights by the end of 2008.

37 Not content to confine its green efforts to recycling, Delta has also become the first U.S. airline to offer its passengers carbon offsets for their trips at the same time that they buy their tickets. The offsets--available only at Delta.com--cost $5.50 per roundtrip domestic ticket, and the money goes to the Conservation Fund's Go Zero program.

38 Paper or plastic? The unsatisfying answer is neither. Retailers including Ikea and Trader Joe's sell heavy-duty polypropylene sacks designed to be reused. But how do you get convenience-obsessed American shoppers actually to use them again? Timberland's (NYSE:TBL) "Trash Is My Bag" totes (made from recycled plastic bottles) cost $5.50 each or come free with a $100 purchase; to encourage reuse--and more shopping at Timberland--each bag doubles as a 10%-off coupon through the end of 2008.

39 Speaking of reuse, Target (NYSE:TGT) has slashed its waste by 70%. The company has applied its signature craftiness to taking advantage of every opportunity to recycle. Last year, it recycled or refurbished 47,600 broken shopping carts, 2.1 million pounds of broken plastic hangers, 4.3 million pounds of shrink-wrap from distribution centers, and more than 10,000 pounds of rechargeable batteries.

40 Knocking down drywall and rebuilding the office every time your workforce shifts doesn't exactly square with running a sustainable business. Enter Steelcase's (NYSE:SCS) new Pathways Privacy Wall, a 10-foot-high steel-frame reconfigurable wall that also happens to be the first of its kind that's "cradle-to-cradle" certified--meaning the entire structure can be economically (and easily) disassembled into component materials for recycling. What's more, it contains 30% recycled materials to begin with.

From: Fast Company

50 Ways to Green Your Business - Part I

Imagine asking today how the Internet affects business. It's an absurd question, like asking how electricity changed business. Asking the same about sustainability, it turns out, is equally absurd. Like the Internet, sustainability spurs innovation in everything, from how you see your business model to whether you see your employees (why not let them work at home more?). Here are our favorite ways companies today are greening up--and saving money and making better widgets in the process.

1 At $100 a ton, feeding a landfill is pricey. But in the past two years, General Mills (NYSE:GIS) has turned its solid waste into profits. Take its oat hulls, a Cheerios by-product. The company used to pay to have them hauled off, but realized they could be burned as fuel. Now customers compete to buy the stuff. In 2006, General Mills recycled 86% of its solid waste, earning more from that than it spent on disposal.

2 Moore's Law is great for producing speedier devices, but it's hell on the environment. According to Greenpeace, demand for new technology creates 4,000 tons of e-waste an hour, which often ends up on dead-hardware mountains in India, Africa, and China. Enter take-back programs, in which customers return spent technology to manufacturers, who recycle the parts for new gadgets. The United States has long lagged behind many European nations, which mandate the programs, but that's finally changing. Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) is leading the way. Last year, the PC maker recovered 40,000 tons of unwanted equipment for recycling, up 93% from 2005.

3 Trains were already the cleanest way to move massive amounts of freight long distances, but General Electric (NYSE:GE) raised the game with its Evolution locomotives, diesel engines launched in 2005 that cut fuel consumption by 5% and emissions by 40% compared to locomotives built just a year earlier. Up next, a triumph of sheer coolness: a GE hybrid diesel-electric locomotive that, just like your Prius, captures energy from braking and will improve mileage another 10%. According to GE, the energy dissipated in braking a 207-ton locomotive during the course of a year is enough to power 160 homes for the same period.

4 Not to be outdone in the freight game, Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) is providing funding to the biggest truck manufacturers--ArvinMeritor, Eaton, International, and Peterbilt--to develop the first heavy-duty diesel-hybrid 18-wheeler. Wal-Mart, which operates the second-largest truck fleet in the country, will test the prototypes next year.

5 Austin-based concert promoter C3 Presents made news when it banned Styrofoam cups from the sixth annual Austin City Limits Music Festival this year. Beneath the quick-hit media pop was a deeper story: Following the model the company created for Lollapalooza, C3 took a holistic approach to greening nearly every aspect of ACL, from bamboo-based concert T-shirts to gel sanitizer in the bathrooms to bio-diesel power generators.

6 It's not just hippies making the special-events world eco-friendly. The Philadelphia Eagles claim to be the greenest team in the NFL--and not just because of the color of its jerseys. Starting this season, the team's "Go Green" environmental campaign has its stadium cleaning crew making two full sweeps after each game--one to pick up recyclables and another for trash.

7 First we counted calories, then carbs. Now it's carbon, as retailers introduce product labels that encourage customers to weigh their eco-sins. The most ambitious: British grocery giant Tesco, which has a program to label all 70,000 of its products with carbon breakdowns.

8 Hamburger Helper helps your hamburger … save the planet? This year, General Mills redesigned the packaging of Mom's old standby, shaving off 20% of the paperboard box without shrinking its tasty contents. The astounding result: 500 fewer distribution trucks on the road each year.

9 Another recent player in the un-supersize movement, Unilever (NYSE:UL), reconfigured the plastic bottles for its billion-dollar Suave shampoo brand, saving plastic equivalent to some 15 million bottles a year.

10 Taking the packaging revolution a step further, the liquid-laundry-detergent industry, goaded by Wal-Mart, has cut the size of its bottles by 50% or more by concentrating the liquid to two and sometimes three degrees of magnitude. Unilever's triple-concentrated All Small & Mighty detergent has saved 1.3 million gallons of diesel fuel, 10 million pounds of plastic resin, and 80 million square feet of cardboard since 2005. This fall, Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) is converting its entire collection of liquids to double concentration.